CHRIS KUTSCHERA 40 YEARS of JOURNALISM
(Texts and Photos)

www.Chris-Kutschera.com

KURDISTAN
TURKEY: PKK dissidents accuse Abdullah Ocalan

As the European Court of Human Rights
(ECHR) ruled the trial of Abdulla Ocalan had been unfair,
some of the former PKK leaders closest lieutenants
were establishing a new political organisation, the Party
Patriotic and Democratic of Kurdistan (PPDK) and voicing
serious criticism of their former leader.

They accuse Ocalan of being a "despot
comparable to Stalin or Hitler", who, they claim,
ordered the murder of a number of dissidents.

These accusers are no small fish :
among them stand old PKK cadres lile Nizamettin Tas, Shahnaz
Altun and Osman Ocalan, a brother of Apo (Ocalans
nickname).

Born
in 1961 in Varto, in the eastern part of Turkish Kurdistan,
Nizamettin Tas, known by the nickname of "Botan",
is one of the oldest and most prestigious military commanders
of the PKK. He became a member of its central committee
in 1986, and was commander of all PKK guerillas in the
1990s.

Shahnaz Altun, born in Batman in 1969,
joined the PKK when she was just 20, and after spending
several months at the PKK "military academy"
in the Bekaa valley, Syria, she became a guerilla in the
mountains of Kurdistan. This impressive smart young woman,
who acquired some celebrity under the name of "Sekine",
finished her career as a military commander at the head
of a battalion of 150 women fighters.

Osman Ocalan, nine years younger than
his brother Abdullah, was born in 1958 in the small village
of Omerli, in Ourfa province. After studying at teachers
training college, he became a member of the PKK in 1978
and spent two years in Libya. He joined the central committee
in 1986, and the executive committee in the 1990s but
suffered disgrace in 1992, after signing a truce with
the two main Iraqi Kurdish parties, KDP and PUK.

With 14 other cadres and about 30
fighters, the three left the PKK headquarters at Qandil,
in the mountains of Iraqi Kurdistan, near the Iranian
border, and found asylum and protection in the area controlled
by Jalal Talabanis PUK. And on 21 October 2004,
they founded the new party, at Said Sadik, near Suleimania.

Alll
three savagely condemn Abdullah Ocalan, who they
accuse of having given up the historical goal of his party
after his capture in February 1999 -- the independence
of Kurdistan.

"Abdullah Ocalan now says the
Kurds are members of the Turkish nation. He openly claims
he is a Kemalist, and that the Turkish state can rely
on him", says an angry Nizamettin Tas. "Before
he blamed the Kurds of Turkey for being "assimilated",
for suffering of an "illness of personality".

These dissidents also blame Abdullah
Ocalan for his policy of confrontation with the Iraqi
Kurdish political parties, Massoud Barzanis KDP
and Jalal Talabanis PUK. "He calls South Kurdistan
(Iraqi Kurdistan) a second Israel", says Nizamettin
Tas, "but he wants to make the Kurds servants of
the Turkish policy".

"I went to the mountains to liberate
my country and for the independence of Kurdistan, but
realised that it was not possible to fight against Turkish
colonialism in this organisation", says Shahnaz Altun.
"One man decides everything, nobody else can say
what they think".

Osman Ocalan, the brother of Apo,
was a member of the executive committee of the party,
and virtually second in command of the PKK in the early
1990s. He was also arrested, jailed and tried!

"In June 1993, they removed all
my powers", Osman Ocalan told The Middle East during
an exclusive interview. "I was isolated in a cell
for three months and interrogated for 52 days before being
tried in February 1995. The trial lasted only one day.I
was warned that if I continued to defend my ideas, I would
be executed. If not, I would be pardoned. A lawyer ?
Out of the question. The trial was conducted under the
law of the mountain" !

One wonders why all these cadres who
have been victims of Ocalans despotism for more
than 10 or 15 years did not leave the PKK earlier ?
The pursuit of patriotism is their answer. "PKK was
an undemocratic marxist-leninist organisation", admits
"Botan", but it was waging a war of liberation
of Kurdistan. For this reason we did not want to criticize
the party, we did not want to impede the war effort. After
the collapse of the Soviet Union, we had to find an alternative
to armed struggle, and we began to criticize, in secret,
the despotic way Apo was running the war. Some of us were
punished for that. It was not until after Apos capture,
we started organizing ourselves openly. In 2003, the leadership
of the party split and, since it was impossible to reform
the party from inside, we quit with 18 former members
of the central committee of the PKK.

Shahnaz
Altun and Nizamettin Tas explain why many members of the
PKK dare not leave the party : "When we are
in the mountain, we have no relations with the outside
world. And since the PKK decided to kill those who want
to go, fear prevents people from leaving", says Botan.
"To become a member of the PKK is like joining a
religion", adds Sekine, "if feeds an ideological
dependence, and even in Turrkey, some people still consider
Apo a prophet. It is easy to join PKK, it is difficult
to leave it".

It is all the more difficult for PKK
members to quit the party and come down from the mountains
if they are also leaving friends they have fought alongside
for years. And it is a struggle for them to re-adapt to
civil life: most of them took to the mountains when they
were aged 18-20, they have no training, no job skills,
nothing to equip them for any other form of life.

"I was myself in this situation...
I could see no way of leaving the mountain. I ignored
developments in the world outside", says Sekine,
who spent the "best years of her life", from
23 to 35, with the guerilla. "If we could create
an organisation to help the people who want to quit, maybe
open camps in Iraqi Kurdistan where they could leave their
weapons and take up alternarive political activity, it
would be much easier for them.

In spite of all these difficulties,
Nizamettin Tas, Osman Ocalan, Shahnaz Altun, Kani Yilmaz
and their frriends who defected ftom the PKK have created
a new party, the PPDK, which elected a commitee of 21
members, with Nizamettin Tas as secretary general, and
an executive committee of 3 members :Botan, Kani Yilmaz,
and Serhat. (Apparently, Osman Ocalan, who has a "genetic
tendency to consider himself as the leader", has
been marginalised). Having given up armed struggle, the
PPDK now wants to become a structured political party
and seize the opportunity of the EU-imposed reforms to
force the Turks to accept them. "If there is a degree
of democracy in Turkey, if the Kurds choose new leaders,
they can organise themselves within the civil society
and the Kurds will reach their aims through democratic
means", says Nizamettin Tas.

"We want to set up a federal
system in Turkey, coordinating our efforts with other
parts of Kurdistan and preserving the unity of all Kurds.
Maybe in the future we will have an OLK -- an Organisation
of Liberation of Kurdistan", Nizamettin Tas observed.

"My fundamental aim is still
the independence of Kurdistan", explains Shahnaz
Altun, "but through a process of federalism. Independence
will come later".